{"id":3869,"date":"2016-10-31T15:25:07","date_gmt":"2016-10-31T19:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/?p=3869"},"modified":"2016-10-31T15:39:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-31T19:39:14","slug":"cfp-jbr-innovation-in-the-digital-age-from-stage-gate-to-an-agile-development-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.servsig.org\/wordpress\/2016\/10\/cfp-jbr-innovation-in-the-digital-age-from-stage-gate-to-an-agile-development-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"CfP JBR: Innovation in the Digital Age"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pub_jbr_1\"Special Issue of the Journal of Business Research<\/em><\/p>\n

Innovation in the Digital Age: From Stage-Gate to an Agile Development Paradigm?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Guest Editors:\u00a0Stefanie Paluch, Malte Brettel, Christian Hopp, Frank Piller, Torsten-Oliver Salge and Daniel Wentzel<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you\u2019re going to wake up this morning as a software and analytics company.\u201d This is how Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric (GE), summarized the disruptive changes triggered by the digital transformation that hit virtually all companies. GE responded by creating GE Digital and redefining itself as a \u201cdigital industrial company\u201d with a focus on digitally enabled products (Rigby, Sutherland and Takeuchi, 2016).<\/p>\n

As a result, product development at GE and many other companies around the globe increasingly involves – and indeed resembles – software development. Over the last decades, the process of software development has been shaped by the adoption of so-called agile development methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming, or lean development (Cram and Newell, 2016). These agile approaches take the inherent unpredictability of software development into account and advocate highly iterative, time-boxed development cycles owned by self-organizing cross-functional teams that actively solicit and incorporate customer feedback at each iteration to improve the working software as the dominant measure of progress (Beck et al., 2001). The focus of agile development on rapid execution, customer validation, and iterative refinement appears valuable in particular when customers exhibit changing preferences and high willingness to collaborate, when problems are complex but can be broken down into distinct modules for successive iterations, and when interim mistakes constitute valuable learning opportunities rather than major risks to be avoided at all cost (Rigby, Sutherland and Takeuchi, 2016).<\/p>\n

However, purely digital products like software enable granularity of development tasks and rapid iterations much easier than complex mechatronic products. Can GE, and other companies really develop complex physical products like gas turbines or medical devices at Internet pace and in constant iterations? Also the tragic death of a Tesla driver using a beta version of the firm’s “autopilot” function illustrates the inherent risks and ethical challenges associated with using agile approaches in more conventional contexts with high safety requirements.<\/p>\n

It is against this backdrop that this Special Issue (SI) on \u201cInnovation in the Digital Age: From Stage-Gate to an Agile Development Paradigm?\u201d explores whether traditional product development models such as Stage-Gate\u00ae are still fit for purpose in today\u2019s digital age or whether they are set to be widely replaced by agile approaches even in more traditional contests. While some scholars argue that this is likely to be the case (Rigby, Sutherland and Takeuchi, 2016), others see potential for both \u201cpara\u00addigms\u201d to coexist or even converge in the form of Agile-Stage-Gate Hybrids (Cooper and Sommer, 2016; Sommer et al., 2015).<\/p>\n

Given the practical and scholarly relevance of this question, we call for a holistic and rigorous assessment of this possible paradigm change in innovation management. Opportunities to elucidate the debate and contribute to this SI are manifold and include, but are not limited to, the following:<\/p>\n

CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS<\/strong><\/p>\n